Short story reads like the first page of Snow Crash, recombined and awesome -- Leonard Richardson's "Mallory"

Futurismic just published Leonard Richardson's stupendous, colossal, monumentally geeky story "Mallory," which reads like the first three paragraphs of Snow Crash, but extended, remixed, and oh, so sweetly.

Leonard was one of my writing students at Viable Paradise a couple years back and he made a great impression then. And this is just the kind of story I love Futurismic for publishing. Run, don't walk -- and expect great things from Leonard Richardson.

Thanks to the General Arcade Machine Emulator, Vijay now inhabited a golden age. His laptop held every arcade game ever released, or at least the important ones, the ones written before games started getting ridiculous peripherals like drum kits and full-scale Army tanks. The only hard part had been finding the seedy web site that offered all the games as a graph. Because these games, even the forgotten ones, are still under copyright, and that eight kilobytes of data can’t go on your laptop unless you’ve got the two-hundred-pound cabinet to go with it.

Even three thousand games weren’t enough for Vijay, because none of them were perfect. So he’d built the Selfish GAME, which bred mutants with barbarians, spaceships, and wizards. It had been fun for two years and now it had stopped working. A week after the Pyromancy deadline, while all the cool people were converging on a field in Idaho with their machines and duct tape, Vijay was doing the most boring thing he could think of: making a spreadsheet. Most of the work he delegated to a script, but writing the script was so boring he didn’t mind when Rodney called.

25 Responses to “Short story reads like the first page of Snow Crash, recombined and awesome -- Leonard Richardson's "Mallory"”

guernican, while I’ll grant you some similarities between snowcrash and neuromancer (I assume that’s the Gibson novel you’re referring to) I wouldn’t say Stephenson was trying “so, so hard” to be Gibson. They’re two completely different styles to my reading.

Now Stephenson writing the same book twice (I’m looking at you “baroque cycle”), that’s another matter entirely.

Wow. While I think Gibson is great, he’s not in the same league as Stephenson, IMHO.

Gibson has a bunch of great ideas and a good story telling gift, but Stephenson creates whole worlds, complex and multi-layered. After I’m done with a Stephenson book, I sometimes pick it right back up and start over.

I have long held that SF has a special relationship with grammar because it must so often invent all kinds of new language and style to be effective. I believe every instance of non-literary grammar helps SF stay relegated to genre fiction and evokes a kind of pulp-ism clearly inappropriate for writers like Gibson, Stephenson, Doctorow, Banks and, yes, Leonard! These are all defensibly writers of Literature with the big L. Writing about the future or technology ultimately shouldn’t land you in a specific section in the bookstore any more than writing about an autistic kid who learns to play virtuoso piano should.

I think a sentence like “because none of them were perfect” potentially hurts a piece like this. None is traditionally singular when accompanied by a prepositional phrase; none would pretty clearly mean “not one” here. There’s an almost alarmingly passionate thread on Metafilter about this actually: http://ask.metafilter.com/21238/is-none-singular

You could argue that he’s establishing voice, but I don’t think so given the rest of the piece. Yes, I realize I need to get out more.

Is calling someone an troll considered a form of trolling in and of itself?

It depends if they’re a troll or not. Are the comments malicious? Do they represent the real opinions of the commenter or are they designed solely to offend? Are they lengthy and repetitive? Are questions answered, arguments rebutted with new material? Does the subject have a history of other comments on other posts? Are they reasonable? If someone really is a troll, why shouldn’t you say it. It saves me time because I’ll just ignore their comments once they’ve been called out. Calling someone a troll just because they disagree with you is definitely trollish.

The primary reason I’m here is because I fell for Cory’s writing. I loved what I just read, and I loved Snow Crash. It’s got so much gusto, and is just so damn fun. Thanks for the new find. And for those of you who didn’t like Snow Crash, maybe you would enjoy the audio version better. It’s very theatrical. I’ve listened to it several times now.

@ #1 Guernican: Not that I agree, but I can see why some people would dislike Snow Crash; the ending is a bit limp. If you’re inclined to give Stephenson another shot, each of his books have gotten better and more complex. The Diamond Age is, for my money, exquisite.

Here’s what I commented on Futurismic about this story:

This rings to my internal ear as though Cory Doctorow or Charles Stross wrote Douglas Couplandâ€™s Microserfs. I assure you I mean that in only the best sense.

Itâ€™s a beautiful bonsai in its present form, and if it stays that way that will not change. Should Mr. Richardson choose expand it, I hope and suspect it will be more so.

Mmmmhmm. I bought Snow Crash solely on Cory’s recommendation. I think it’s safe to say that that’s the last piece of his literary criticism I’ll be giving any credence to. Unless this one doesn’t in any way come across like a terribly gauche young man trying so, so hard to be William Gibson?

I was lucky enough to read Mallory in draft! *Dances with glee at having Leonard for a friend.* Anyway, and with all fond bias, I think a closer parallel is space-opera-era Vinge. Mallory is *that* closely argued and smart.